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Recovering the Feminine Voice in Nabokov's Lolita

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Recovering the Feminine Voice in Nabokov's Lolita Belmont University Belmont Digital Repository English Theses School of Humanities Winter 11-20-2020 This Is What Makes Us Girls: Recovering the Feminine Voice in Nabokov's Lolita Amanda Wulforst [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.belmont.edu/english_theses Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Wulforst, Amanda, "This Is What Makes Us Girls: Recovering the Feminine Voice in Nabokov's Lolita" (2020). English Theses. 1. https://repository.belmont.edu/english_theses/1 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Humanities at Belmont Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Theses by an authorized administrator of Belmont Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 2 Table of Contents Chapter 1: Such a Nasty Woman: Reclaiming Lolita from Toxic Freudian Analysis and Cultural Misconceptions ..................................................................................................... 5 1.1 Literary criticism ....................................................................................................... 6 1.2 Lolita’s modern significance ..................................................................................... 9 Chapter 2: (You’re the) Devil in Disguise: Exposing Lolita’s Abuser and Contemplating His Madness ...................................................................................................................... 23 2.1 The man behind the mask and his past .................................................................... 24 2.2 The monster removes his veil .................................................................................. 36 2.3 Unearth the devil, recover the girl .......................................................................... 43 Chapter 3: A Trauma to Remember: Lolita, Sally Horner, and the Realities of Sexual Abuse ................................................................................................................................ 47 3.1 The Sally Horner connection ................................................................................... 48 3.2 Lolita’s ceaseless cycle of trauma ........................................................................... 57 3.3 Death provides escapism for trauma ...................................................................... 64 Chapter 4: Run Lolita Run: A Subversion of Masculine Hegemony and Lolita’s Feminist Resurrection ...................................................................................................................... 68 4.1 Psychoanalytic feminism brings meaning to the text .............................................. 69 4.2 The uplifting feminist death ..................................................................................... 76 4.3 Recovering Lolita in film and modern narratives ................................................... 80 4.4 The strength of survivor testimonies ....................................................................... 85 3 Chapter 5: Girl, I Believe You: Illuminating Survivor Testimonies to Mend the Cycle of Sexual Trauma .................................................................................................................. 89 5.1 The significance of the survivor’s voice .................................................................. 90 5.2 Survivors reclaim the narrative from abusers ......................................................... 91 5.3 Reframing the narrative around sexuality and abuse ............................................. 94 Works Cited ...................................................................................................................... 99 4 List of Illustrations Figure 1: RAINN statistics on sexual assaults .................................................................. 10 Figure 2: "Lolita" art, Lana Del Rey, Born to Die Album ................................................ 12 Figure 3: Lolita costume from website lolitain.com ......................................................... 14 Figure 4: Actress, Alyssa Milano, shares “MeToo” post.................................................. 15 Figure 5: Lolita, directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1962 ........................................................ 82 Figure 6: Lolita, directed by Adrian Lyne, 1997 .............................................................. 83 Figure 7: Cuties movie poster comparisons ...................................................................... 97 5 Chapter 1: Such a Nasty Woman: Reclaiming Lolita from Toxic Freudian Analysis and Cultural Misconceptions The mind of the pedophile is an incomprehensible object to many ‘normal’ individuals. What makes a person attracted to young children and why do they feel the unfathomable compulsion to use children for sex? Vladimir Nabokov pens Lolita as a psychological investigation into the most renowned literary sexual predator, Humbert Humbert. By framing the novel through a memoir composed by Humbert’s own hand, Nabokov provides the reader with an in-depth inspection of his psyche and his irrational love for the twelve-year-old Lolita. However, Humbert’s narrative is intent on distorting the reader’s perception of him. He plays with the reader’s understanding of his mental neuroses and, by doing so, attempts to gain their sympathies. Humbert uses his traumatic childhood and psychoanalysis to convince the reader that his lust for girls stemmed from these events. With solipsism, he also depicts Lolita as a sensual creature who provokes her own objectification and as a woman who encourages his craving for her. Nabokov humanize this despicable character, thereby critiquing the reader’s ability to evaluate Humbert because of his unreliable first-hand testimony; with this multifaceted text, Nabokov confuses the reader and how they should feel about its unfurling contents. The reader who sympathizes with Humbert in lieu of Lolita, falls prey to his seductive words and comes face-to-face with their own morality. Humbert is not a good man and he knowingly, willingly kidnaps and rapes Lolita. Lolita is not a seductress and cannot exert any control over her situation. Yet, the sad fact is that many readers fall quarry to Humbert’s rhetorical prowess and, because of the work, “the name Lolita has become synonymous with a sexualized view of young girls” (O’Neill 2008). Therefore, it is 6 imperative to exercise a new reading of this novel and upend modernity’s interpretations of both Humbert and Lolita. In this thesis, I explore how Humbert utilizes Freudian theory to justify his perversions and contort Lolita into the perpetrator, how trauma theory pits Humbert as a predator and Lolita as the disenfranchised victim, and how psychoanalytic feminism can fully recover Lolita’s voice despite Humbert’s narratorial control within the novel. Ultimately, I claim that feminist criticism reclaims Lolita from her subjugation and her trauma, transforming her into a resilient and formidable survivor against masculine sexual violence. 1.1 Literary criticism Humbert employs psychoanalysis for his personal gain throughout this novel. Sigmund Freud established this study as an attempt to uncover the inner mechanics of the human mind and treat mental neuroses. With this theory, Freud alleges that loss triggers conflict between the conscious and unconscious, yielding mental fixations. For instance, Freud addresses two types of emotional responses to loss in “Mourning and Melancholia.” In this essay, Freud states that mourning is a normal, conscious reaction to the libido’s forced detachment from a loved object; conversely, Freud depicts melancholia as the extreme psychological response to this loss. Most importantly, Freud notes that if a melancholiac chooses to abandon the object in favor of ambivalence, the “new substitute-object” transforms into an outlet for retaliation (Freud 162). Therefore, the griever obtains pleasurable fulfilment from compulsive, sadistic torment on the self (Freud 162). These responses reveal an important theme for grieving individuals: intense mental trauma sparks internal fragmentation and undermines the sufferer’s original identity. When applied to literature, Freudian theory allows writers and critics alike to 7 navigate the chasms of the mind, finding new and meaningful ways to examine life and understand artistic expression. Yet Humbert manipulates Freud to garner sympathies from his reader and explain away his sadistic fixation on young women. Humbert reveals his childhood traumas to the reader: his mother dies in his infancy, his aunt expires on the brink of his pubescence, and his father leaves him to start another family near his adulthood. As if these wounds are not enough, his great love, Annabel, succumbs to disease before he is able to culminate their relationship. For all these reasons, Humbert’s anguish impacts his psychosexual development and aggravates his emotional state. He also demonstrates how his fragmented mind leaves him attracted to girls or, as he refers to them, ‘nymphets.’ Humbert uses psychoanalysis to mask his evil from the reader, disguising his true monstrousness with science; through this criticism, Humbert conceals his crimes against Lolita and obscures her pain from the narrative. Psychoanalysis cannot fully unpack this novel as it concentrates exclusively on Humbert’s vindications for his criminalities and injures the reader’s understanding of Lolita.
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